Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Deep dives into Nielsen and other data that provide insights into streaming.
Sometimes, in a midst of lots of disruption, we—the proverbial we being “society”, “business analysts” or just people on Twitter—forget that as much as things change, they mostly stay the same. That’s the lesson for today. Two lessons actually. While streaming ratings use new terminology, the business principles underlying them
Listening to a recent podcast, I heard a common refrain: we have no idea what is doing well in streaming! Frankly, this is soooooo 2018. (Just like “soooooo” is so 2000s.) We’re in the “streaming ratings era” now (™ EntStrategyGuy) and have been since March of 2020. Between Nielsen, Google Trends,
A few years back, working at a major streamer, I tried to make the case that at some point Nielsen (and others) would tell the world how many folks were watching our shows. As a company, we were focused on preventing that; the currency of viewership would be a highly
One of the craziest parts of the streaming wars is actually how forward-thinking the traditional media companies were. Way back in 2007, they teamed up and created a joint venture that became Hulu, a streamer featuring TV episodes the day after they aired on broadcast. (But only, inexplicably, five episodes
Not since the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact—a 1982 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey for those not versed in obscure 1980s science fiction—has something Jupiter-related caused this much consternation. On the one hand, Netflix is touting Jupiter’s Legacy as a success that will birth an entire universe
I want to assure you, good readers, that this report is not becoming “bi-weekly”. And “bi-weekly” in the sense that it comes out every other week. (If folks keep subscribing—and want it—I could see a world where we publish twice a week. Man “bi-weekly” is a confusing term.) If you
I leave for one week of vacation and come back to not one, but two big merger announcements. If all the merger news of the last two weeks shows us anything, it’s the value of top tier content. And what’s the easiest way—allegedly—to do that? By mining “IP” to make
This week, Them, from Prime Video made it up to second place on the “Originals” top ten list from Nielsen. Which left me wondering: Is Amazon’s Prime Video having their best stretch ever? Let’s find out. That plus Thunder Force’s “good” debut, The Handmaid’s Tale having an (allegedly) strong debut,
Folks, we’re on the cusp of a big moment for our data analysis. For the first time, I’ll be able to compare the latest week’s Nielsen’s rankings to the previous year’s trends. Combined with the fact that we have more than years worth of Netflix Top Ten data too—I use
For the second week, we have another “first”! This time, the first Hulu Original to earn a spot on the Nielsen top ten “originals” list. At some point, we’ll run out of firsts, but for now setting new records is fun! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report compiles data from Nielsen’s